10-19-2021, 12:36 PM
Katniss Everdeen, a hero of The Hunger Games, exemplifies someone living in a dystopian society, best described as an exaggeration of all that is wrong with a 3T carried to its logical conclusion, a grossly-inegalitarian order in which survival in a ferociously competitive world offers few rewards in return. Sports are a form of entertainment, but unlike those of recent times in which the losers are still well-paid entertainers so long as they qualify for their teams, sports become winner-take-all... and there is not much to take.
Dystopian fiction typically expresses what people most dread about their time. The Hunger Games are made for largely a Millennial audience, an audience that has the most to fear of bad trends of their time. 1984 has the dread of the spread of Communism or the revival of fascism, both of which turn words into lies and paralyze the ability to make moral judgments. Brave New World has amoral, devious science engineering people into a rigid class hierarchy in which everyone is born into a niche based upon intelligence (smart Alphas to lord it over everyone to helpless deltas and epsilons condemned to toil but too stupid to realize how badly they are exploited. Soylent Green suggests consequences of overpopulation.
Basic fears of current trends shape dystopian fiction. I have my idea for a world in which Global Warming has taken place just in time for the Crisis of 2020. Let's start with the most basic reality of life: Man really does live on bread; if not than spirituality, culture, and technology have no cures. Imagine a quarter of the world's population, most of them from marginal peasant communities, displaced. They still need to eat, but because the rising sea level has inundated their small plots of land, they cannot feed themselves anymore. I doubt that we will develop wearable solar panels that can supply us the sort of energy that could supplant that we get from the Calvin Cycle that basically reverses photosynthesis to power us. Deserts have expanded into crop-growing areas of the middle latitudes. Winter wheat in the American Great Plains? No winter... and no wheat.
Dystopian fiction typically expresses what people most dread about their time. The Hunger Games are made for largely a Millennial audience, an audience that has the most to fear of bad trends of their time. 1984 has the dread of the spread of Communism or the revival of fascism, both of which turn words into lies and paralyze the ability to make moral judgments. Brave New World has amoral, devious science engineering people into a rigid class hierarchy in which everyone is born into a niche based upon intelligence (smart Alphas to lord it over everyone to helpless deltas and epsilons condemned to toil but too stupid to realize how badly they are exploited. Soylent Green suggests consequences of overpopulation.
Basic fears of current trends shape dystopian fiction. I have my idea for a world in which Global Warming has taken place just in time for the Crisis of 2020. Let's start with the most basic reality of life: Man really does live on bread; if not than spirituality, culture, and technology have no cures. Imagine a quarter of the world's population, most of them from marginal peasant communities, displaced. They still need to eat, but because the rising sea level has inundated their small plots of land, they cannot feed themselves anymore. I doubt that we will develop wearable solar panels that can supply us the sort of energy that could supplant that we get from the Calvin Cycle that basically reverses photosynthesis to power us. Deserts have expanded into crop-growing areas of the middle latitudes. Winter wheat in the American Great Plains? No winter... and no wheat.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.